


BlameItOnTheStardust

by Analinea



Series: Be still, my whumper's heart [6]
Category: Charlie's Angels (2019)
Genre: Angst, Blood Loss, Day 10, F/F, Happy Ending, Sabina is pinning so I'm not putting it as ship, Sabina whump, Whumptober 2020, but they do love each other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-10
Updated: 2020-10-10
Packaged: 2021-03-08 03:02:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,520
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26928589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Analinea/pseuds/Analinea
Summary: Sabina used to believe she would go on forever like this, living a half-life of adrenaline and cities around the world, missions and loneliness. She was fine with that.But then she met Jane for the second time. Then Elena.And her life suddenly became tangible.
Relationships: Elena Houghlin & Jane Kano & Sabina Wilson
Series: Be still, my whumper's heart [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1947337
Comments: 2
Kudos: 27
Collections: Whumptober 2020





	BlameItOnTheStardust

**Author's Note:**

> This is actually the first Charlie's Angels story I wrote, before whumptober, but then I thought I'd keep it in case a prompt would work for it aaaand it did :D
> 
> One of these days I promise Elena will be at the center of a fic! I have more Charlie's Angels for whumptober *rubs hands*
> 
> Title comes from Hymn by Kesha!

- _ if we die before we wake– _

She’s a typical story, actually. Sabina thinks that if anyone was to write a book about her, it would get a two stars rating and some scalding reviews.  _ I’ve read the exact same story before _ . The readers would add that the main character isn’t original: just another rich, pathetic fuck up who goes on to be some kind of vague spy through mysterious means. She’s not even likable. Kind of boring, too.

Sabina never went for full-on self hate, she just doesn’t hold herself to high regards. She may not love herself, but she’d say no one ever really does anyway; acceptance is where happiness is at. So that’s what she does: she  _ tolerates _ herself, then pats herself on the back for a job well done on the whole positivity thing.

What’s a pretty decent set up for a story, though, is her...situation. An agency of women spies, and a voice speaking through a speaker calling them Angels; that’s kind of a dream.

A dream as in a period of time that seems both too short and never-ending. Real and not. Something that fades away with the light to leave you with nothing but sand between your fingers. 

Sabina used to believe she would go on forever like this, living a half-life of adrenaline and cities around the world, missions and loneliness. She was fine with that.

But then she met Jane for the second time. Then Elena.

And her life suddenly became tangible.

They haven’t seen each other in quite some time –that’s just the life, you know. They’re not a twenty-four-seven team, not when missions need only one or two of them, or when the third is in bad shape.

Some jobs require Elena’s fresh eyes and scientific expertise, some Jane’s cold professionalism and amazing fighting skills.

Sabina is really good at blending in, pretending. She paints herself in new colors and survival kicks in to create a perfectly tailored character. Sometimes, she’s scared that her sincerity would seem like another invention, so no one would believe her core self’s truth. That’s how she turns into a no-filter person: she decides that saying whatever comes to mind is the solution. Giving pieces of herself away and screaming, “See? This is  _ me _ !”

But somehow, the girls never doubt her. 

First mission back together is a blast. It’s everything badass and uncomplicated about the job, and Elena doesn’t even fry anybody’s brain this time. Sabina doesn’t have to watch some guy go through a compactor. No one is betrayed or blown up. They don’t have to question their own morality.

It’s great.

It’s hard. 

After so long apart, Sabina had forgotten how much she loves them both. Her heart has always been a detachable part of her; it’s easy not to miss people. It doesn’t mean she loves them less– it’s actually the exact opposite. She just stops herself from hurting, and she doesn’t need a therapist to understand that. She would need one, to stop being scared of that ability.

Instead, she doesn’t dwell on it, goes on to the next present time. It goes well.

Until it doesn’t.

“You have no idea what it’s like!”

Sabina wants to argue but she’s already tired of the fight so she gives up. She’s heard it all, has ached from it. From that look people give her when they realize where she comes from, what kind of failure she is: the privileged one who fell off the deep end because she didn’t get enough hugs from mommy and daddy.

She knows she’s a joke, that’s why she never takes herself seriously.

She also acknowledges that Jane talks in anger, and Jane’s anger is a song performed emphatically but without empathy. It’s a liar. It deflates when Sabina doesn’t punch back; Jane turns away. Elena takes a step towards them with her hands raised, like they’re spooked horses. Or threats.

In the silence that follows, ringing with echoes of the fight, Sabina and Jane can’t look at each other. Sabina feels the sharp thrust of shame and guilt in her guts: she  _ knows _ Elena is uncomfortable with confrontations.

“Sorry,” she mutters to the room when it’s been just a little too long, making Jane sigh and glance over her shoulder.

“Nah,” she says, “I’m sorry, B. Shouldn’t have said that.”

It’s a new thing, the nicknames. They vary, unsettled on one particular form for now, but they’re there. It makes something warm uncoil around Sabina’s heart every time; she forgets about the past minutes and smiles.

She moves to get her arms over Jane and Elena’s shoulders, playfully shakes them once and laughs.

“Let’s go get a drink, yeah?” She detaches herself to take a step, swings around so she walks backwards as she points at Jane. “This one’s on you,” she winks, righthing herself with a laugh when Jane rolls her eyes with a grin and a fake reluctance.

Sabina’s smile falls for a second when she remembers that this isn’t written in forever, it can’t, but then she decides that looking at the last page of a book is kind of lame anyway. 

She’d rather enjoy the line she’s reading now.

And line by line, this is how it goes: for a second that slides into eternity, something cold takes hold of the space between Sabina’s ribs, radiating a violent chill into the marrow of her bones, right to the center of her lung.

But time folds into itself; she barely realizes she’s feeling every inch of the knife sinking into her chest before it punches a scream out of her. All the training can’t have her silent in the face of an agony that takes her by surprise.

She’s rendered mute in the next instant, trying to draw in air but finding that her muscles’ incessant seizing won’t let her diaphragm expand. She chokes. Fire surrounds her panicked heart until she could swear the flames are what will kill her. 

Tears block her vision but she doesn’t let herself forget that she has to hold on to Jane. Her arms shake and burn with the powerlessness that threatens to seep into every muscle fiber of her body, but she has adrenaline and sheer force of will on her side.

She doesn’t even remember seeing Jane stumble out the window, or the instinct that got her to catch her by the wrist fast enough. But there Sabina is, the lifeline between Jane and the merciless ground four stories down. In the position that allowed her attacker to stab her. 

A whimper passes through the lack of air and the need to stay strong; it echoes along her throat, all the way to her soft palate– she feels it more than she hears it, head full of cotton balls.

“Sabina!” Her name being called pulls her back to the single second she lives in, to Jane’s desperate face surrounded by emptiness. 

“Sa–” is all she gets again before pain shows its hidden face: the knife is ripped out of her chest with a twist. She lets out a choked howl and watches her own tears fall on Jane’s face like they’re somebody else’s. Jane says something that gets lost in the void between them. Time expands and dances and stays out of her reach.

A century could have passed before the gasp that brings vicious air back into her lungs and reveals a secret Sabina wishes she’d never learned: breathing can feel worse than not.

_ Hands, my hands, keep Jane, hands, keep Jane alive, no dropping, hands _ her minds chants at the edge of her awareness, without her control. Hard pants and stubborn heartbeat give rhythm to the litany. 

Sabina’s knees shake, thighs burning from the hurt radiating from her rib cage. She looks at Jane with the knowledge that she won’t be able to save her, she looks at her hand around Jane’s wrist, skin on skin. They’re both sweaty from the stress and the pain. 

Sabina’s pulse quickens from the terror– the blood loss– both.

Survive and protect. Survive  _ to _ protect; once, life taught her to let go of her self-preservation instincts but taking care of the people she loves is written in the protein chains of her genetic make-up. Hearing Elena fight behind them, Sabina swears she’ll at least live long enough for Jane to be safe in someone else’s hands, no matter how much it  _ hurts _ and she wants it to  _ stop _ .

She fractured a finger once, and it aches without fail every time it’s about to rain. She feels it flare up and twitch now. Rainfall, Jane’s fall, she’ll prove it wrong, dammit.

“Sabina,” a broken call, a broken record, a broken name– Jane’s voice, she recognizes with a newfound clarity, the fresh peace of someone who knows exactly when to let go: soon, but not yet.

She jolts when something brushes against her shoulder  _ oh _ , she had closed her eyes.

Elena pushes past Sabina to grip Jane by the arm, by her shirt, her shoulders, waist, everywhere she can to help pull her and her dislocated shoulder up– Sabina remembers about that now. 

The loss of Jane’s weight as the counterbalance keeping her hanging halfway out the window sends her slipping to the floor, down down down, ceiling filling her vision and giving her the space to stretch in the absence of pain. 

She doesn’t hear her name being called again, per-say, but she recognizes its familiar vibrations in the air as she disperses in it and disappears. 

She welcomes the silence.

Sabina turns several blank pages before snippets of a story let themselves known, drafts hastily scribbled down that don’t make sense on their own.

The first is a tilted view of a chest covered in hard bulletproof material. She sways and rocks dizzily, wondering why it’s so hot outside all of a sudden. Did no one teach Elena the fireman’s carry? Because something is on  _ fire _ .

Sabina’s head rolls back and forth of its own accord as she chuckles with abandon at the ceiling turned blue blue bl– She loses herself in the color while thinking  _ no, I’m more– I’m more of a red person _ . She flies up.

Then comes a soft slap, thunder in her ears and “Sabina” repeated like lightning strikes, igniting her. 

Elena’s features are painted in immortal anguish when Sabina opens her eyes, by god she’s so beautiful. Sabina wants to wipe away the tears on her cheeks but, she rasps a breath in, looks down. Her hands refuse to move.

She’s hurting somewhere, she thinks, but her mind is too far away from her body to pinpoint an exact location. She notes the red, so much of it, on her, pooling under her, staining Elena.  _ Told you ‘bout red _ .

It has to come from somewhere, but she doesn’t care where. She closes her eyes.

Except the answer wakes her up: a pair of fine hands press down on her ribs. Sabina is being stabbed all over again; she screams this time, or she tries to but all she hears is a half-assed sob she kind of hates. The agony is an attention whore, just like Sabina, and just like with herself she wishes she could get away from it.

But failing to escape the pain takes her only towards more pain, all encompassing.

A twisted embrace.

Each of Sabina’s blink is a mile traveled to a place of relief. Someone pleads,  _ please please _ , and she has no idea if it comes from Elena, Jane, or herself. She’s just grateful to...

To drip down with the tears on Elena’s face.

Pain

  
  


becomes

  
  
  


a memory

  
  
  
  
  


of itself.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


Then comes back to haunt her. 

She jolts to tingles in her veins, eyes shooting open on the sight of a syringe.

The order of realization is: she can only breathe in through her clogged nose, she can’t open her mouth,  _ there’s a hand pressing down on her face _ .

She fights back with hard earned muscle memory, back arching off the floor, feet scraping the concrete. Then a familiar voice reaches the light inside of her, stopping her violent struggle.

Elena shushes her like a child– not like Sabina is one but like she herself feels lost and scared.

“Nina, please,” a sob, “you have to stay quiet.”

Sabina must have lost parts of herself, because no one besides her dead grandmother calls her that. For a wild second, the ceiling overhead is wooden panelling, she’s seven, and she finds the familiar shape of the troll head in the knots.

It’s her bed upstate, her safe haven, her belief that life is promising and she’s cared for. Her favorite horse is waiting for his treat later today.

In this wormhole memory, she’s nothing more than baby teeth, ponytails, good attitude so maybe…

Maybe…

Not yet, the turning sour when being perfect didn’t fill in the cracks running all along her veins. Not yet, justifying the void where parental love should have been with her own failures. 

“Sabina,” a whisper. 

She exits the past and finds a feeling she hates: clammy from probably going into shock soon. Everything is so cold. Her eyes roll around in search of–

Elena. They can’t really stop, go: ceiling, wood boarded window, Elena, wood boards. Elena again, finally stopping. “This place can’t be sanitary,” Sabina chuckles, coughs, regrets having opened her mouth. 

She gasps her way back so Elena doesn’t have to worry– she sure hopes she’s the only one hearing her lungs doing a computer crash dump noise. She feels wet inside; she idly wonders how many tears she swallowed and how much before she drowns. There’s an odd old key taste at the back of her throat that she ignores. 

Her head –cushioned on something soft– rolls around in search of–

“Wh– whe’s–” 

Sabina blinks the burning sweat out of her eyes so she can focus on the dark shape sitting next to the heavy door, riffle in hands. “You okay?” she breathes out, glancing slowly between Jane and Elena when they look at each other with the kind of meaningful look she never understands. It drives her crazy.

“They’re close,” Elena answers the question Sabina hasn’t asked, “but if we keep quiet they shouldn’t find us.” There’s a bruise under her left eyes, when she turns her head the right angle. Sabina wants to brush it off, but she can’t move her arms.  _ Deja vu _ , she frowns.

“J, I can’t–” Elena stutters out, “I can’t get it to stop. We have to make it stop,” she sobs out the last word. It feels misplaced in the conversation, to Sabina. She might have missed something. It doesn’t matter. She figures she’s about to die real soon and it’s weird, she doesn’t hate it as much as she should now that she has people she doesn’t want to leave behind. But it doesn’t  _ matter _ . 

Jane is limping her way to Elena and Sabina, unbalanced from how the world keeps tilting this way and the other.

“Sab, please! Saba!”

Sabina can’t tell if she’s too tired to breathe or if the air just ran out of the room because she was too demanding. 

“–TXA...bag?”

Sabina runs through the IATA codes but finds no airport with TXA. She says as much, which gets ignored. Rude.

“–fire.”

Oh yes, please, she’s cold. Crisp air. Camping, sparks flying up to turn into stars burning close enough to warm her, so far away they blanket the world in a comfort woven with breathless awe.

The earthquake takes her by surprise; her bones trying to create mountains out of her, that’s how hard she feels herself shaking. She wouldn’t mind a strong hug to contain the tremors threatening to create whole new continents by ripping her apart in a million pieces. But see, she’s at the edge of sleep still, barely woken up, so she doesn’t have the will to blindly reach for the girls.

“Nina,” grandmother says, running a weathered hand through Sabina’s long, long hair. She feels like dying with grandma, but she promised to be a wise little girl so her heart has to try. And it does. It valiantly does.

But Sabina can’t quite blame it for failing.

Sabina, while being quite observant, sometimes contradictorily can’t understand people. Well. She can’t understand the people closest to her.

She comprehends her teammates, the building blocks of them; she knows Jane will compartmentalize up until the point where one of her mental boxes is too full and she starts sobbing like a baby. The right words can make her laugh in a second, but the wrong breath will lock her up inside of herself until she can pretend to be steady again.

Sabina knows Elena will forget everything around her when creating. Someone needs to be there in the right way; not too distracting, enough to get food past the hyperfixation. Her protectiveness of her work is just shy of trauma, but it’s also a mark of how precious it is to her. She’ll even let you watch her work, if you’re gentle.

Sabina stands at the junction to Jane and Elena’s defenses. She’s not sure why they both let her approach and coax and see, but they do.

One day, Jane told her, “From the very first day, you knew what to say. Like, you comforted Elena, even if you can be  _ super _ awkward, but I’m too...blunt. For that.” Blunt. Like a weapon. Sabina didn’t like to hear her talking about herself like that. She told Jane as much.

One day, Elena told her, “It’s not that I don’t care, it’s just– I don’t know how to be there, I’m always scared of being too much. You never seem scared to be yourself, you just...you  _ are _ and it looks easy. Honest.” She shrugged, but Sabina frowned.

“I  _ am _ scared,” she said, but Elena just tilted her head to the side and the meaning of her smile was lost to Sabina. 

She finds it wonderful, that she’s the best at pretending but these amazing girls can see her exactly as she is. They don’t read every fuck up on Sabina’s skin, don’t hold her past against her.

But she doesn’t get it. She really doesn’t.

Words. A jumbled unmade puzzle of sentences, floating around the drugged void of semi-consciousness; Sabina is familiar with not only the aftertaste of depressants, but also of blood. 

Both combined never mean anything good, so she stays still and swims languidly out of the cotton padding her brain.

“There's a chest seal in the medi–”

“Except we lost that when we scrambled out of the car a second before it blew up.”

The accent, a little sharp, a little anxious, fits into Sabina's ears as if it always lived there. The tone is too tired for an argument, but still Sabina would rather skip the scolding part of whatever seems to be happening. She's always scolded for something, even when she's not sure what.

She loses time trying to feel her own body with her mind: toes, ankles, calves, just like Saint taught her to meditate. 

Except her body is...not there. Sabina is a vague, untethered consciousness, and she’s not even really good at that.

“–EpiPen I understand, but the TXA?” 

Sabina has a feeling like...like  _ planes _ under her tongue. No idea why.

“Don't ask,” says a warm round voice, settled, a little more static-y than usual.

Sabina puts the last touch on the fill-in-the-gaps quiz and finally places the subject of the conversation. It's  _ herself _ . 

Her mental frown must show, judging by sudden flurry of movements around her and the firework of voices; she reinstates her body with unprecedented violence. 

“It's okay, it's okay sweetheart, breathe.”

Sometimes, she wishes sweethearts weren't so easy to give, so meaningless. Or, well, she wishes they had  _ more _ meaning when addressed to her. That line of thinking would matter, if only she could find her breath again now that she’s aware of having lost it. It was so easy when she didn’t have to process doing it.

When she didn’t have a knife creating a dead space in her flesh, Jane tipping through the window, Jane at the tips of her fingers, Jane? Free falling?

Fuzzy gray concrete ceiling turning to blue, turning to the white and ugly yellow greeting her when the  _ now _ takes its rightful place in front of her open eyes. Her body aches, but it doesn’t hurt as much as it should; the back of her dry and scraped raw throat tastes like lack of pain. 

Two impatient faces come into focus, mouth moving frantically, but their colors spread like ink on paper.

Before she falls back asleep –she thanks the doctors for the meds– she hears herself ask, “Is Jane okay? Elena?” except there’s less vowels.

In return there’s wet laughs, and a quiet, “Yeah, yeah we are. Go back to sleep,  _ love _ .”

And that, somehow, she  _ understands _ .

She makes a note to bring it up later.

She’ll probably forget; it’s okay though. They have time.

  
_ –who we are is no mistake- _

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on [bubblr](https://kinsbournescream.tumblr.com/tagged/ana-writes-sometimes)


End file.
